Four Hours of Fury

by James M. Fenelon

  Finally at 07:10 on Saturday morning, with reports of approaching Allied tanks, Schlemm could wait no longer. After a stressful delay caused by failed ignition fuses, he watched as four massive explosions launched the bridges skyward before they buckled into the Rhine. The remains of the two bridges jutted out of the flowing river like a petulant child’s abandoned erector set.

  Several of the straggling German troops, abandoned on the west side when their escape route literally went up in flames, shot at their own engineers in the fury of having their fate decided for them.

  The next day, on March 11, the High Command’s Daily Report stated that “in order to use the better defensive lines on the east bank of the Rhine, our forces evacuated the left side of the Rhine in the Wesel Bridgehead in a deliberate and disciplined manner.”

  * * *

  The skillful withdrawal caught the Allies by surprise. Upon reaching the banks of the Rhine, General Simpson, commander of the US Ninth Army, the only American troops assigned to Montgomery’s army group, anticipated a quick assault crossing. In his and his staff’s opinion, the Germans were falling back in disarray and would be unable to react effectively to a hasty, violent river assault. But Montgomery vetoed Simpson’s plans. The crossing of the Rhine in the British sector would be executed according to Montgomery’s strategy, and there would be no impromptu expeditions.

  There is little doubt that an immediate crossing, forced before the Germans properly reorganized on the far bank, would have succeeded and kept Schlemm on the run. Instead, the Allied advance in the British sector sputtered to a standstill at the river’s edge, just as many American generals had predicted.

  Allied intelligence officers scrambled to develop an accurate understanding of the German situation across the Rhine. How effective had the withdrawal been? What was the enemy’s morale? What was Schlemm’s strength? The enemy’s disposition and intentions would be more difficult to determine now that the Rhine separated the two belligerents. The 3,000 German soldiers left on the west bank became prisoners of war and the Allies’ initial sources of information.

  Interrogations led to the estimate that Schlemm’s 116 Panzer-Division and the 15 Panzer-Grenadier-Division had escaped with only thirty-five tanks between the two of them. However, as the dust settled, it became clear that while Schlemm had retreated, he’d done so in a well-organized manner. An Allied intelligence officer noted, “From the enemy’s POV, the evacuation from the Wesel bridgehead can be considered successful. At no time was this withdrawal disorderly.”

  Schlemm, despite fanatical meddling from Berlin and overwhelming Allied firepower, managed to save almost all of I Fallschirmjäger-Armee’s remaining artillery and evacuate enough troops and armor to establish a formidable defense on the far bank. Consequently, the Allies’ immediate intelligence goal was to determine the rate at which Schlemm’s army would be reinforced and how effectively the German commander could array his defenses to repel Montgomery’s river crossing.

  CHAPTER 5

  “FIFTY PERCENT OF TWO IS ONE”

  Châlons-sur-Marne, France. Mid-March 1945.

  As Schlemm and his Fallschirmjäger-Armee retreated across the Rhine, Thad Blanchard, a twenty-three-year-old sergeant in Able Company, 1st Battalion, of the 507th Parachute Infantry Regiment, returned from a week in the hospital to find half his squad manned by replacements. Wounded during a patrol in Luxembourg by either a land mine or a mortar round—he never knew which—Blanchard had spent two more weeks on the line with his lacerated face covered in bandages and sulfa ointment. Only after the division was withdrawn from the front did he consent to proper medical attention.

  Blanchard empathized with the replacements; having been one himself, he knew how tough it was to join a veteran outfit, and he appreciated that while the new men were certainly green, they’d all volunteered to be there.

  His own journey into the parachute troops had been a long one. Blanchard’s hometown of Fallon, Nevada, was so small—population 2,400—and remote, that he had to report over 300 miles away, at Fort Douglas, near Salt Lake City, on December 23, 1942. Because his family had been in the construction business and he was familiar with operating heavy equipment, he figured he’d be tapped to be an engineer or a tank driver, but instead the Army designated him a rifleman.

  After spending his first eighteen months of service as a stateside infantry instructor, he finally shipped to Europe as a volunteer for the parachute troops. Upon completion of jump school in England, he joined the regiment in July 1944 when they returned from France after the Normandy jump.

  * * *

  The 507th, originally an independent regiment attached to the 82nd Airborne for the invasion of France, transferred to the 17th Airborne in August 1944 to bolster Miley’s division with a fourth infantry regiment. The move irked the veteran paratroopers, who were proud to be part of the legendary 82nd. At the time, the 17th had yet to be tested, and the 507th’s arrival made it the only unit in the division with any combat experience—the reality of which the regimental commander, Colonel Edson Raff, made sure everyone was aware.

  Raff’s nickname, “Little Caesar,” reflected both his aggressive attitude and his diminutive height of five-foot six-inches. Raff had taken over the regiment after the founding commander was captured in Normandy. Viewed as an outsider by the men of the 507th, Raff made it clear that his command style would be in direct juxtaposition to the more relaxed manner of his predecessor. Raff’s brash attitude and his reshaping of the regiment polarized opinions of subordinates and superiors alike.

  Chester McCoid, a captain in the division’s intelligence section, considered Raff a “miserable monster” when it came to dealing with staff matters and noted that Little Caesar “seemed to relish savaging his own tall subordinates, or anyone else’s.” But McCoid conceded, “Despite his queer quirks of character, Raff was a terrific combat leader.” Other officers held a less charitable opinion, regarding Raff as a loudmouth publicity seeker.

  A 1933 graduate of West Point, Raff’s credentials could inspire professional jealousy. In 1942 he had led the Army’s first parachute assault of the war into North Africa, and shortly thereafter Eisenhower personally promoted him to full colonel. The fighting in Algeria and Tunisia, against first the Vichy French and then the Germans, reinforced Raff’s belief in the value of grueling training. He developed several adages on unit readiness from his combat experiences in North Africa. One of his favorites, “The squad and platoon must be perfectly trained. They win battles,” was perhaps his men’s least favorite.

  His focus on the smallest element in the Army’s inventory capable of inflicting violence was often mistaken for micromanagement. Many of the Normandy veterans took offense at Raff’s back-to-basics approach of relearning fundamental field tactics, viewing it as a vote of no confidence. His physical training regime was unpopular as well. Raff liked to exercise—a lot. However, after the cauldron of the Ardennes, many of his critics begrudgingly admitted his approach saved lives.

  While other regimental commanders might limit their interactions to senior leaders—battalion or company commanders—Raff took a direct interest in the welfare of each man behind a rifle. As one reporter noted, Raff let his authority and rank remind his men that he was in command, not his distance or aloofness from them.

  His men didn’t always appreciate the attention. The occasion of Private Donald Greene getting “clapped up” instigated Sergeant Blanchard’s first meeting with his regimental commander. Raff, who abstained from drinking, gambling, and smoking, waged a one-man war against vice and venereal disease. If during one of the many “short-arm inspections” a medic discovered a case of “Cupid’s itch,” Raff required the guilty party, his squad leader, his platoon leader, his company commander, his battalion commander, and the regimental medical officer to report to him and explain their combined ineptitude at maintaining unit hygiene. Disease affected the regiment’s combat strength, and therefore Raff deemed a man’s poor decision betwee
n the sheets to be official business. Raff viewed Blanchard’s defense—that he wasn’t present at the time to enforce the use of prophylactics—as a weak excuse and a leadership failure. Concluding his tirade, Raff reminded them all that the boxes of condoms available at the main gate were there for a reason.

  • • •

  Having led the final drive of the division’s assault in Luxembourg, Raff’s Ruffians licked their wounds in Châlons. Indeed, Blanchard’s squad reflected the state of the regiment, which had suffered 700 casualties: 100 killed, 600 severely wounded or injured. The losses from the Ardennes fighting had been top down, including two of Raff’s three battalion commanders.

  With his wounds mended and his position as squad leader reclaimed, Blanchard now set his mind to getting his new men up to Raff’s standards. The regiment’s training cycle once again focused on the basics, with plenty of monotonous road marches and textbook field tactics.

  The men also needed to conduct training jumps, not only to maintain proficiency but also to familiarize themselves with new equipment. The latest parachutes incorporated a modified version of the standard T5 harness. The original harness’ three connection points used D-rings and snap links to secure the chest and leg straps, but combat conditions had proven the original design to be a liability. Unable to undo or even reach all three links in a crisis, parachutists had been dragged to death in high winds, drowned in marshes, or machine-gunned while helplessly entangled in trees. As an initial solution, the Army issued each paratrooper a switchblade to cut himself out of the harness in an emergency.

  The new design replaced the three connection points with a single-point release mechanism. The quick-release box, centrally mounted on the chest above the reserve parachute, allowed a jumper to escape with just a twist and a punch. While the more efficient design had been developed in 1943, it took over a year and inquiries by the House Appropriations Committee to ensure that the new releases were produced in bulk and dispatched to front line units.

  During one training jump, Blanchard and his squad, having completed their descent, watched from the ground as the next serial of nine aircraft passed overhead. Their interest turned to horror as two of their fellow troopers plunged to their deaths. One jumper, close enough for Blanchard to witness, clawed at the ripcord of his reserve parachute until the moment he slammed into the dirt field with a sickeningly soft thud. Both of the men’s main chutes had failed to open, triggering several troopers to profanely wonder aloud who packed them.

  Another new gadget introduced to Blanchard’s squad was the M18 57mm recoilless rifle. The M18, more of a rocket launcher than a rifle, was intended to replace the M9A1 bazooka, which, due to the evolving thickness of German tank armor, had become virtually obsolete as a tank-stopping weapon even before it reached the front lines in 1942.

  “Them bazookas were like swatting against those tanks—you had to hit ’em just right,” lamented one paratrooper.

  Certainly taking out an enemy tank with a bazooka took a combination of skill, patience, and bravery. Firing from a relatively safe distance from the tank increased the likelihood that the round would simply explode harmlessly on impact or ricochet wildly off the sloped armor. To overcome the bazooka’s inadequacies, intrepid gunners stalked their prey, working around a tank’s flank to either disable it with a shot in the tracks or damage the engine from the rear.

  The revolutionary M18 had more in common with a Buck Rogers weapon than with its predecessor. Its rifled barrel, with twenty-four right-handed lands and grooves, significantly improved its accuracy and range over the smoothbore bazooka. When combined with its twenty-eight-power scope, the barrel gave the M18 an effective range of over 4,000 yards, more than a dozen times the bazooka’s meager 300 yards. For the first time in the war, paratroopers had a legitimate and lethal anti-tank weapon.

  Recoil-reducing technology was not new, but it was new to the US Army. German engineers at Krupp—a Ruhr-based arms manufacturer—had perfected the technique of channeling gases from a projectile’s ignition rearward through a series of orifices to eliminate the weapon’s recoil while also reducing the weapon’s size. Krupp’s advances had armed Fallschirmjäger with small, hand-towed recoilless rifles in 1941. The American design took the German innovation a step forward by further reducing size and weight. At just over sixty-one inches long and forty-four pounds, the M18 was man portable and could be fired from either the shoulder or a tripod. The shaped-charge projectiles fired by the weapon proved to have greater penetrating power against German armor than bazooka rounds.

  But there were a few issues. First, no one really knew how to use this new piece of hardware. Airborne Army scrounged up a captain who had trained with the weapon back in the States and tasked him with developing a training regimen. Over seven days, 138 officers and enlisted men of the 17th Airborne rotated through his improvised school.

  Divided into three-man crews consisting of a gunner, a loader, and an ammo bearer, the troops drilled getting the rifle into action and practiced their marksmanship. After firing a few rounds, Blanchard and the others learned to respect the recoilless rifle’s significant back blast—almost fifty feet deep and forty feet wide. The choking cloud of dirt and debris thrown up behind the gunner, caused by the redirected gases, could not only kill someone but also telegraph the crew’s position. The troops realized that firing the M18 in combat would require frequent displacement in order to avoid drawing retaliatory fire.

  The other issue was supply. To fully equip the airborne divisions, Supreme Headquarters had requested 200 M18s but had received only two. General Miley, after witnessing a demonstration, became “extremely anxious” to get them for his men and pressed Brereton to procure more M18s in time for VARSITY. Brereton agreed, designating the 17th as the priority recipient of the new weapon—if they could get more in time.

  All of the training culminated in a series of regimental exercises, including a full-scale dress rehearsal of the upcoming operation. On Thursday, March 15, Blanchard’s squad, along with the rest of Raff’s Ruffians, moved to nearby airfields for briefings that lasted until midnight.

  The next morning, the sky was clear and the air cool as the men marched down the flight line to the idling aircraft. They would be taking off at 07:30 for a twenty-four-hour field exercise.

  In addition to testing the regiment’s readiness, the exercise also tested the men’s nerves. Several troopers refused to jump. Whether due to shaky premonitions related to the training drop or the upcoming combat operation itself, they were immediately booted out of the regiment and transferred to a leg unit. Two men were Normandy veterans who claimed they wanted to jump but were unable to exit the plane before it passed over the drop zone. Since it wasn’t feasible to organize another drop, they had to go.

  * * *

  Ridgway, having studied and rejected Dempsey’s VARSITY plan, drafted his own proposal and presented it to Dempsey and others at his XVIII Airborne Corps HQ in Épernay. He’d developed three options for VARSITY and reviewed each in order of preference.

  Dempsey dismissed Ridgway’s first two plans, which called for the airborne troops to land within three miles of the Rhine’s far banks. In Dempsey’s opinion those options were too conservative and more hindrance than help; they lacked the depth he was looking for, and dropping so close to the Rhine hampered his artillery support. Instead Dempsey selected Ridgway’s third option, the one he considered least desirable: dropping farthest inland from the riverbank to create the deepest bridgehead.

  A deeper bridgehead appealed to Dempsey because it offered the best chance to throw the enemy into disarray by landing troops among Schlemm’s rear echelons and thus probably on top of his artillery positions. The deeper targets also included two road networks that could facilitate Schlemm’s movement of reinforcements into the area of the crossing.

  Ridgway listed this option last for several reasons: The surrounding high ground, from which the enemy could pour fire into the assembling troops, would requi
re attacking uphill “with practically no heavy weapon support.” The distance from the drop zones to the friendly side of the Rhine also meant a loss of artillery support, and it put his lightly armed troops in the most likely path of advancing enemy armor, which is of course exactly where Dempsey wanted them.

  Ridgway was also concerned that dropping farther behind enemy lines would increase the time it took to link up with British ground forces. Unwilling to gamble on Montgomery sticking to a reliable timeline of advance, Ridgway wanted his troops resupplied immediately. Because the troop carrier aircraft couldn’t drop the two divisions, return to base, and be reloaded and refueled for a resupply drop in the same day, there’d be no return flights until the second day. Further, if unfavorable weather closed in overnight, it would leave the troops low on ammunition and stranded without vital supplies.

  Dempsey thought he could alleviate Ridgway’s apprehensions by bringing up heavier guns on his side of the Rhine, extending the zone of direct artillery support. Pressing medium bombers into service would solve the supply issue. They could fly in on the tail of the airborne armada to drop twenty-four hours’ worth of supplies. With the pledge of long-range artillery support and immediate resupply, Ridgway agreed his divisions could tackle the mission.

  Once the scheme of maneuver was settled, the discussion turned to the timing of the drop. Initial plans called for the amphibious assault and airdrop to occur simultaneously several hours before dawn. Miley, preferring a night drop, liked that plan; Ridgway, however, wanted a daylight operation. Both options had merits.